Adobe Photoshop CS3

More CS3 Extended goodies

Science!

I'm not going to pretend I know much about scientific research or medicine—other than my briefly impersonating a doctor in kindergarten—so I can't give a very critical look at the new scientific application features in Photoshop CS3 Extended but I can outline what they are for those interested.

Apart from adding DICOM image and Matlab support, Photoshop CS3 adds some features that will likely appeal to a lot of scientific researchers. It won't be hard for them to find these things either since in CS3 Extended, they're clearly available in the Analysis menu:

Heh, he said anal.

Measure and Count tools

Like the Vanishing Point's ruler tool, the measurement tool is designed to let you establish a scale for the image you are analyzing based on a single known measurement (slide width is x length) and then accurately measure everything else based on that proportion.

A ratio of amount pixel to microns is entered for the image below. You can create a preset for these scales for use across multiple documents.

And then you use the Ruler tool to measure the relevant distances and then record those values in the Measurement Log palette:

Heh, he said log.

As well as simple measurements, area selections and their contents (perimeter, gray value mean, etc) can be logged as well. I would guess that this would be good for things like tumor size and density measurement. When you have your measurements, you can then export the values to a tab-delimited text file for a spreadsheet.

This would likely save a lot of manually entering values but it's hard for me to do this feature justice. To get a better understanding of this feature, you can check out Adobe's web tutorial.

Yes, I was the guy in science class copying other people's homework. Which leads me to...

Image stacks

Another significant image analysis feature in CS3 is Image Stacks, which takes a number of different images and combines them to produce an image that can more clearly show a similarity or overall trend. But let the plagiarized documentation speak for me:

An image stack combines a group of images with a similar frame of reference, but differences of quality or content across the set. Once combined in a stack, you can process the multiple images to produce a composite view that eliminates unwanted content or noise.

You can use image stacks to enhance images in number of ways:

To reduce image noise and distortion in forensic, medical, or astrophotographic images.

To remove unwanted or accidental objects from a series of stationary photos or a series of video frames. For example, you want to remove a figure walking through an image, or remove a car passing in front of the main subject matter.

This would ostensibly help visually cut to the chase, eliminating any random Waldos creeping up in your image.

While it's hard for me to see a non-scientific application of the Image Stacks feature, I can see the 2D measurements being used much like the ruler in Vanishing Point. You could quickly measure a logo's height, assign it a known height, do another measurement and then tell the guy on the phone that you're going to need two feet by 4349 feet of bright green sticker stock, stat.

Animation and video layers

While Adobe ImageReady let you open Quicktime or other movie formats for use with animated GIFs, true video support and exporting has now come to Photoshop CS3 Extended. Considering that for animated web buttons, it's often overkill to buy an Application like After Effects, Adobe has loosened the reigns to allow a certain level of feature overlap so that video can be imported, filtered, combined with other animated layers, and then exported to a variety of video or frame formats:

The background video updates as you move through the Animation palette's timeline.

Video layers are indicated by a little film reel icon in the Layers palette and they can be further embedded in Smart Objects for lossless scaling and Smart Filters. As you can tell from the timeline mode in the Animation palette above, it caches frames and works similarly to After Effects (ImageReady style frame by frame animation is toggled at the bottom right). But this clearly isn't a replacement for AE—you can only translate mask layers, you can't animate the contents; there's no audio; there's no changing filter values over time; no spline-based motion curve (it's purely linear); there isn't an AE-style 3D translation option for layers and no light layers.

I can't complain that Adobe hasn't done a good job of replacing After Effects with Photoshop, but it's just to give you an idea of what kind of animation you'd be doing within it. Its main advantage over After Effects for video is that you can do retouching on a frame-by-frame basis so you have the immediate access to pixel data that you're used to with Photoshop but in an animated file. Also, to work more with drawn or frame-by-frame elements, there is an onion-skinning option to show previous and next layers as an overlay. This works well with the Clone Source palette covered earlier since and makes flipbook style animation very easy. When you have an animation that you're happy with, go to File/Export/Render Video...

... and you're greeted by a familiar style video export dialog.

Adobe was smart about the creation of these video-aware documents, so there's no need to export a compressed video if you intend to bring it into After Effects CS3 or Premiere CS3—they can read the animated PSD file. If you want to export to an animated GIF, you use the familiar Save for Web function, instantly giving you those much-loved 300MB animated Myspace icons.

The video layer execution is quite nice overall, and while it won't blow video people out of the water with its power, it does enough to make it useful for the intended audience of people who need to work with video occasionally for various export scenarios. Just be aware that you can't just copy QuickTime footage and paste it into Photoshop—you always need to have a referenced movie file (or image sequences) for Video Layers. This might have been to eliminate the creation of giant Photoshop documents with redundant frames eating hard drive space.

But video layers are a little limited in one way: Flash integration. While it can export directly to .flv Flash video files, Photoshop doesn't recognize them to open or place in documents. Sometimes you just want to eyeball the video within a sliced site layout and all you have to work with is the final video (which is also much smaller), so being forced to use the uncompressed source QuickTime files is limiting here, since in a team environment the interface guy isn't likely to be the video editor. This forces you to have three versions of the file: one uncompressed, one for web and one proxy for the interface guy.

Also, you can't export slices as movies, which is how many web movies are used (animated Flash backgrounds or placement in a larger table). You're forced to crop the PSD file to export size. But that's the worst of my complaints and even with the limitations relative to After Effects, video layers can produce sophisticated results when coupled with time-based cloning, hand drawn elements and Smart Filters. It's a more pixel-pusher friendly melding of ImageReady animation with a basic After Effects.